Earlier quoted context omitted.
What moat? There are multiple companies providing pareto-optimal frontier models, and it takes O(10) people to build one of these things. The rest is capital intensive, and the price will approach the cost of production over time. Thinking this is a profitable endeavor is equivalent to claiming coal plants have good margins because boilers are expensive.
I think we agree? What moat? You answered yourself: "capital intensive" But, history says the supercomputer of today will fit in your pocket in a few years. They've bought up all the RAM and GPUs, which pushes the capital requirements upward for everyone else. But, they can't corner the market forever, there are too many competing interests. AMD and Intel keep making new GPUs and APUs. The memory makers can't just se…
I don't think this will be true in the same time span anymore. Each miniaturization is costing more and more money.
Perhaps they'll come up with exotic fundamental improvements, but I don't think the rate of improvement of compute/watt will match the previous decades.